Google Quantum Supremacy
According to google report on quantum supremacy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, today’s company website published an article entitled “What is the meaning of our quantum computing milestone”, on Google in quantum A major breakthrough in the field of computing was reviewed and its application prospects were prospected.
Pichai said in the article that it took 13 years before Google made this breakthrough. The reason why I was betting on quantum computing was because Google believed that quantum computing could accelerate the resolution of some of the world’s most pressing problems, from climate change to disease.
Today, with this breakthrough, people are one step closer to applying quantum computing. For example, designing more efficient batteries, using less energy to make fertilizers, and finding out which molecules can make effective drugs, and so on.
Pichai also compared Google’s quantum computing breakthrough to the first rocket that successfully escaped the gravity of the Earth and reached the edge of space. At that time, some people asked: Why do we have to get into the space and get any useful things? But this is a major innovation for science because it allows humans to imagine a completely different journey, to the moon, to Mars, to beyond our own galaxies. It shows us what is possible and puts seemingly impossible things on the agenda.
The following is the full text of the Pichai article:
Today, Nature published a commemorative article on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the magazine, expounding a major breakthrough in the field of quantum computing by Google’s research team, namely “quantum supremacy.” This is a technical term meaning that we have begun to use quantum computers to solve problems that are solved using traditional computers, and the time required is unimaginable. Obviously, this moment represents a major milestone in our efforts to solve the computational problem using the principles of quantum mechanics.
While being excited about the future, we are also humbled by the journeys we have experienced in achieving this achievement. We are mindful of the wisdom left by Richard Feynman, the great Nobel Prize winner: “If you think you already know quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
In many ways, the effort to build a quantum computer is a big lesson about everything we don’t know about the world around us. Although the universe is fundamentally operating at the quantum level, humans are not experiencing this way. In fact, many of the principles of quantum mechanics directly contradict our surface observations of nature. However, the nature of quantum mechanics has great computational potential.
A bit in a conventional computer can store information as 0 or 1, and a qubit can be 0 and 1, which is a property called “superposition”. So if you have two qubits, there are four possible states, and you can stack them together. Obviously, this state of computing will grow exponentially. For 333 qubits, there will be 2^333, or 1.7×10^100 computational states. You can stack it together, allowing quantum computers to simultaneously explore many solutions a problem might have.
As we expanded our calculation possibilities, we opened up new calculations. To prove its superiority, our quantum computer successfully completed a test calculation in just 200 seconds. For the traditional most powerful supercomputer, it takes thousands of years to complete. The reason we are able to achieve this speed is because of the quality of our control of quantum bits. Although quantum computers are prone to errors, our experiments have shown that it is less capable of making mistakes in large-scale computing than traditional computers.
For those of us who work in science and technology, this is the “hello world” moment we have been waiting for, and the most significant milestone in quantum computing to date. However, from today’s laboratory experiments to the practical application of tomorrow, we still have a long way to go; we need many years to achieve a wider range of practical applications.
For today’s news (a breakthrough in quantum computers), we can imagine that the first rocket was built to successfully escape the gravity of the earth and reach the edge of space. At that time, some people asked: Why do we have to get into the space and get any useful things? But this is a major innovation for science because it allows humans to imagine a completely different journey, to the moon, to Mars, to beyond our own galaxies. It shows us what is possible and puts seemingly impossible things on the agenda.
This is what this milestone means to the world of quantum computing: a possible moment.
For Google, it took us 13 years to make this breakthrough. In 2006, Google scientist Hartmut Neven began to explore how quantum computing can help us accelerate machine learning. This work led to the formation of our Google AI Quantum team. In 2014, John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his team joined us in our efforts to build quantum computers. Two years later, Sergio Boixo published a paper highlighting our efforts on a well-defined task of quantum superiority computing. Today, the team has built the world’s first quantum system, surpassing the capabilities of traditional supercomputers in this particular computing.
We made these early bets because we believe that we still believe that quantum computing can accelerate the resolution of some of the world’s most pressing problems, from climate change to disease. Given the quantum mechanical behavior of nature, quantum computing provides the best opportunity for us to understand and simulate nature at the molecular level. With this breakthrough, we are now one step closer to applying quantum computing. For example, design more efficient batteries, use less energy to make fertilizers, and find out which molecules can make effective drugs.
Of course, these applications will take many years to explore. But we promise to build such quantum computers to power these discoveries. We have always been clear that this will be a “marathon” action, not a short sprint. To build something that hasn’t been proven yet, there is no script. If the team needs a component, they must invent and build it themselves. If it doesn’t work (and often doesn’t work), they have to redesign and rebuild it.
A turning point occurred in October 2018, when wildfires in Southern California raged. I received a message that, with enough caution, they needed to close the Santa Barbara lab for a few days. What I didn’t know was that the team was experiencing a period of slow progress. But a few days of forced vacation helped the team reset and think differently in a different way, and a few months later they made this breakthrough.
Like any advanced technology, quantum computing has its own problems. In thinking about these issues, we followed a series of artificial intelligence principles that we developed to help guide responsible advanced technology innovation. For example, over the years, the security community has been working on “post-quantum cryptography” with the support of Google. We are optimistic that we are ahead of the issue of encryption in the future.
We will continue to publish research results and use our open source framework Cirq to help the wider community develop quantum cryptography algorithms. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their support to our researchers and for working closely with the NASA Ames Research Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As with the Internet and machine learning, government support for basic research remains critical to long-term technological success.
I am excited about the huge impact of quantum computing on Google and the future of the world. Part of this optimism comes from the nature of technology itself, which dates back to the “giant” computers of the 1950s, and today we use artificial intelligence to serve people’s daily lives.
Quantum computing will be a great complement to what we do on traditional computers. In many ways, quantum will bring a complete cycle to computing, giving us another way to use the universal language to understand the world and humans, not just in 1 and 0, but in all states: beautiful, complex, and With unlimited possibilities.